Numerated, a Boston-based SaaS fintech which automates business digital loan origination for banks, announced a strategic acquisition of Fincura Inc., according to a press release shared with FinLedger.
Founded in 2017, Fincura was created by commercial bankers to expedite traditional business credit application processes. The company uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and artificial intelligence (AI) to automate manual processes and provide an intuitive banker interface.
The acquisition will help Numerated’s banking clients offer increasingly larger small business loans at scale, with the addition simultaneously reducing work for bankers, improving underwriting accuracy and delivering faster decisions to customers, according to the press release.
“Our customers asked us to make the process of financially analyzing a business better,” Numerated CEO Dan O’Malley said in an interview with FinLedger, explaining how the acquisition came about.
“We went looking in the market to find a partner who could help us with that, and lo-and-behold, we actually found a company headquartered in the same city that had the same vision. They were focused on spreading and financial analysis, and so it was just an incredible match,” he said.
Fincura is Numerated’s first acquisition to date, and now enables the company’s Digital Loan Origination System to:
- Accurately and automatically convert any type of financial statement or tax return to data.
- Combine AI and banker input to rapidly analyze and spread complex financial statements.
- Provide the financial institution with a point-and-click experience to trace calculations back to source documents.
- Reduce the time to accurately spread business financials from 90 minutes to under 5 minutes.
Moving forward, Numerated says the acquisition will help the company to arm community and regional banks with the best lending tech for small business and become a full-scale loan origination system (LOS).
“For the last two years, the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) has dominated what banks have done; it has dominated the capital for business. What we are seeing today in Q4 is the industry starting to move beyond that for really the first time in almost two years,” O’Malley said.
“Businesses are re-engineering their supply chains, businesses are re-engineering how they go to market, and they’re using capital to help accelerate that and so we are seeing an increase in loan demand,” he said.
As these businesses gear up for another year and update their processes, O’Malley says Numerated is adding capabilities to offer more loan types, and it is doubling down on its investments to make the experience even more frictionless.
“The process of gathering the information for a loan is painful. It’s hard,” O’Malley said, explaining how Numerated’s platform creates a seamless, easy-to-use path for loan origination.
“What we do is remove about 75% of questions in the application process, and digitize how all of the documentation gets pulled together. Loans on our platform can be as fast as three minutes, because our system is working behind the scenes to assemble the bank’s documentation,” he said.
In other recent fintech news, the Office of the Comptroller of Currency (OCC) released its semiannual risk report, citing increased operational risks due to cyber incidents. SMB account provider Nearside also raised $58 million.